Word: chautauquas
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...Sundays, emphasis is on music, with such features as the Chautauqua Symphony and the community sings...
...ended. Clifford's father was a traveling auditor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. His uncle was the late, fire-breathing Clark McAdams, liberal editorial writer on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His adoring mother is Georgia McAdams Clifford, who overrode the objections of her husband and became a Chautauqua circuit storyteller. One of her favorite numbers: the story of Persian Prince Sticky-sticky-stombo-no-so-rombo-hody-body-bosco-ica-non-nun-a -non-combo-tombo-rombo, who drowned in a well, wherefore his brother Yip became king...
...there were 200 waterside Chautauquas in 31 states.But Chautauqua really became big business when it hit the road in tents. During the peak year of 1924, Chautauqua visited 12,000 U.S. towns and villages whose leading businessmen had underwritten, willingly or grudgingly, all the expenses (the management got all the profits under the "standard" contract). That year, 30 million people crowded into the big brown tents and it looked as if Chautauqua were going on forever. The following year it went into a slump from which it has never fully recovered...
...Right to Be Rich. Authors Case & Case do not examine intently enough the reasons for Chautauqua's rapid decline (the explanations advanced-the advent of good roads, movies and radio-might explain a falling-off, but not a collapse). But they tell just how the system worked and a good deal about the performers who took to the "man-killing" circuits (seven days a week, often for three months) during the summer heat. William Jennings Bryan was Chautauqua's top attraction for a quarter-century, sometimes drew over 10,000 customers...
...hands of good people. . . .I say you have no right to be poor. . . ." Conwell gave the lecture 6,000 times, for fees ranging from $100 to $500. Each night, after deducting his expenses, he mailed the money to some "deserving" boy to help him through college. Chautauqua was like that...